THE PREVALENCE OF living alone during later life varies widely throughout the world, though everywhere its social relevance has grown substantially in recent decades. This living arrangement, more widespread among women than men aged over 65, is one of the most visible characteristics of societal aging currently underway. Explaining residential options among older persons and the different strategies implemented in societies of diverse cultural and historical traditions with different levels of development has important implications for our understanding and management of aging. Most of the research on this subject has concentrated on the developed world because it is there that levels of single living during later life tend to be highest as a result of the decline of intergenerational coresidence and the increase of solitary living among elderly people

Spain has recently become the destination for large numbers of international migrants and now ranks as a key focal point for international migration in Europe. Currently, approximately one in ten residents in Spain are foreigners, up more than tenfold from figures existing at the outset of this century. Migration has now become a major social and political issue in the country. In order to provide reliable data about migrants in Spain for researchers and policy makers, acting on a proposal of a research team working within the context of the Population and Society Research Network (GEPS), the Spanish Statistical Office has recently carried out an extremely ambitious survey of foreign-born persons currently living in Spain. In the course of the survey, nearly 15,500 persons were interviewed regarding a large array of issues pertaining to their migration experience. Important documentation, including the project report, the methodological specifications of the survey, and the anonymized micro data have recently been made available to the scientific community and to policy makers at the website of the Instituto Nacional de Estadística. The purpose of this paper is to describe this data source, its content, its methodological underpinnings, and the way the fieldwork and data cleaning were carried out. Examples of preliminary results will be presented so as to underscore the potential this survey affords for researchers everywhere.

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Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organization of welfare services. Based on micro-data from the 2011 Spanish population census, logistic regression techniques are used to assess the impact of fertility on living alone among elderly women net the effect of age, marital status, educational attainment, and other standard population controls. Our results show a clear relationship between completed fertility and living alone. Childlessness is strongly associated with living alone, while having offspring acts as a powerful buffer against living alone, particularly in larger families. A relevant conclusion of this study is that a growing deficit of family resources available for the elderly women will take place in those societies where low fertility and high rates of childlessness have prevailed in recent decades, leading to substantial growth in the number of childless elderly women and in the incidence of living alone during later life.

During the central decades of the twentieth century there is ample though often indirect evidence that a significant rise in fertility took place in much of the world. In some countries with historic demographic transitions this trend change has been called the baby boom. Elsewhere it has often been called the demographic explosion. Seldom has it been addressed from a global perspective. The main goal of this paper is to study these shifts comparatively, assessing the extent to which the timing and the mechanisms behind increasing fertility were or were not shared by different areas of the world. The paper provides a detailed description of fertility trends in 13 countries from four continents, based on a cohort approach to fertility and making use of data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International (IPUMS-I). Our analysis shows that, with some exceptions, increasing fertility was a global demographic phenomenon, although there are important variations in terms of intensity, timing, and duration.